Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  A wolf whistle from lookout Spielman signaled Jumarong’s return at 1030. This time, de la Cruz was with him. “They did not explain the tardiness,” explained Mellnik. “And we were too relieved to make an issue of it.”

  Anxious to put distance between themselves and the Japanese, they silently formed up in a single-file line—the Filipinos at the fore, Dobervich and Hawkins bringing up the rear—to move out. One by one, with reserved exuberance, the prisoners passed through the jungle threshold.

  The escape party had scarcely penetrated the fringes of the jungle, yet it seemed even more darkly foreboding than it had during the dummy run. The fugitives panted and splashed through puddles of standing water and tangles of dense foliage for nearly an hour before their exhausted lungs, unaccustomed to the musty humid air, demanded a rest.

  Dobervich and Hawkins took seats on a log next to Spielman and Marshall as the latter doled out cigarettes. It was the first time that the others had had an opportunity to meet the young Army enlisted men. Hawkins studied Spielman; he knew a Texan when he saw one.

  “What part of Texas are you from?” he asked.

  “Carrizo Springs.”

  “That’s down in the mesquite country, isn’t it? I’m from Texas, too.”

  “Good. That makes three of us,” said Spielman. “I hear Captain Dyess is from Texas.”

  The escapees were just about acquainted when McCoy ordered them to their feet. Covering their cigarette butts with mud, they returned to the trail, which grew more indistinct and overgrown with each labored step. Drenched with perspiration, they bridged gullies, crossed innumerable small streams, and stumbled over stumps, all while trying to keep from being ensnared by drooping vines. It was unlike any trail any of them had ever seen. “In fact, I could hardly believe that we were on a trail at all,” said Hawkins. Neither could Mellnik.

  The afternoon sun breached the gloomy skies and the ceiling of thick tropical foliage, providing enough light for Mellnik to notice that their shadows were moving in the wrong direction. He pulled McCoy aside and both officers carefully observed Jumarong. At 1400 hours, their suspicions were confirmed by a frightening discovery: their own footprints, proof that they had indeed been moving in circles. A nervous Jumarong entered into a hasty conference with de la Cruz in Tagalog.

  “Victor says that he has lost the trail,” reported de la Cruz. “It has been over a year since he was on it and the trail has changed.”

  Jumarong tried to get his bearings, but another hour of aimless wandering forced McCoy to call a halt. He pulled out Acenas’s map, which the others examined over his shoulder.

  “I’m afraid we’ve lost it for good. I imagine we are about here, but there is no way of knowing,” he said, hazarding his best guess of their location with a fingertip. “I believe the best thing to do is to try to follow a course generally northeast and try to hit the end of the Japanese logging railway about here.”

  McCoy’s finger moved to a point some ten to fifteen miles northeast of Anibogan.

  “If we go that way, we’ll be getting into the swamp pretty soon,” said Hawkins.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” admitted McCoy, “but I don’t know what else to suggest. If we don’t head for the railroad we’ll probably just wander on into the jungle indefinitely.”

  Following the compass, they proceeded on the new course. Predictably, the terrain became progressively more marshlike. The mud grew thicker and deeper; clumps of shrubs gave way to mangles of trees.

  There was no sign of a Japanese search party, but they were hardly alone. Doves flapped away upon their advance and they heard the grunts of wild hogs. Mosquitoes invaded their nostrils and ears and attacked any exposed skin, as did the leeches. Once gorged with blood, the half-inch-long parasites were capable of doubling, even tripling in size. And for fear of infection one could not simply pull off the bloated blue blobs. During breaks, they singed the tiny parasites with lit cigarettes. The nicotine also provided a much needed spike in energy. Still, by the time they encountered their first major obstacle, a large stream, Dyess and Grashio were noticeably flagging in the oppressive, late afternoon heat.

  Shofner suggested felling a tree across the stream. “Shof was always quoting the Field Manuals,” said Hawkins. “As we say in the Marine Corps he knew ‘the book’—or claimed he did.” Thanks to Boelens’s prowess with a bolo, their bridge was in place minutes later. Placing one foot carefully in front of the other, each man slowly felt his way across. The last, Grashio, was only two feet from the bank when he wobbled off and splashed into the water.

  “Haw, haw, haw,” laughed Shofner as he helped Grashio ashore. “Old Surefoot himself. That’s the Air Corps for you. Boy, how did you ever pilot a P-40 with balance like that?”

  “Oh, shut up, Shifty,” was all Grashio, dripping and embarrassed, could manage in reply.

  “Jeep pilots, that’s what you Air Corps boys are,” joked Shofner.

  “Don’t talk about the Air Corps,” interjected Dyess. “What have the Marines done in this war anyway?”

  “Ever hear about Guadalcanal?”

  “Toot, toot. The Marines have landed. Why don’t you quit blowing your horn.”

  “Okay, boys, let’s knock off the Army-Navy game,” said McCoy, hustling them forward.

  Only later would Grashio understand that Shofner’s ribbing was not without purpose. They needed to be prodded forward by any means necessary, be it the whip of Shofner’s tongue or otherwise. “His judgment was remarkable about who could profit from a few words of encouragement, who needed a few minutes’ relief from carrying his pack, and what kind of half-joking, half-jarring remark would pick us up a bit,” recalled Grashio. “Shofner knew what had to be done, how to do it and possessed the dynamic leadership to get it done.”

  Hawkins, though, wasn’t one to open his mouth very often. He did not think McCoy was checking the compass often enough to maintain an accurate course heading, but for the time being he decided to keep his thoughts—as well as his fears that they were again covering familiar ground—to himself.

  They encountered another large stream at approximately 1745, and with nightfall near decided to set up camp rather than attempt another crossing. After a dinner of canned corned beef, deviled ham, and cold rice, they drained their canteens. Ready to refill his with swamp water, Hawkins asked de la Cruz for the water purification tablets from the first-aid kit. Instead, the Filipinos pointed out an alternative water source: the long, fibrous buhuka vines festooned around their bivouac. The Americans were surprised to learn that when sliced open, a six-foot length of inch-thick rattan yielded a half-canteen’s worth of sweet, pure water.

  “I never knew my porch furniture was good for drinking,” cracked Hawkins.

  Jumarong then demonstrated how to use strips of the vines to bind saplings and branches into raised sleeping platforms that would keep them out of the leech-infested mud and water, the level of which would inevitably rise with the nightly rains.

  They finished their beds in the darkness and were just about to turn in when they heard the sound of drumbeats pulsing the jungle. “It was a dull throb,” Shofner wrote, “like the heartbeat of the primeval rain forest.” Hypnotized by the ghostly cadence, they stopped slapping the persistent mosquitoes to listen. The rumors of cannibal tribes that inhabited the swamp, previously dismissed out of hand, had suddenly become audible reality. They had heard of the Atas, Manobos, and Magahuts, but just which, if any, of these indigenous tribes was responsible for the strange, rhythmic beats was unknown. The message being pounded through the jungle was equally puzzling.

  “What is it?” asked one unsteady voice.

  “Drums,” deadpanned another. “Wild people.”

  “Do you think they know we’re here?”

  “Hard to say.”

  Shofner, sensing that the moment was ripe for raillery, decided to break the spell. In time with the drumbeats he chanted, “Heads are available! … Heads are available! … Heads are av
ai—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Shof, shut up!” came an interruptive reply out of the darkness.

  The drums silenced just as quickly and mysteriously as they had begun, but the incessant pounding reverberated in their heads as they dozed. According to Dyess, the fugitives were jolted awake by more sounds—“a resounding crash followed by heavy splashes and the most spectacular profanity”—only to learn that they were not under attack from headhunters or the Japanese. The Marines’ bed had collapsed, dunking the occupants into the watery ooze.

  A steady, soaking rain, as well as their crude bunks and escalating anxiety, ensured that the night was a miserable, largely sleepless one. But there were others who were restless that night, too.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 4–MONDAY, APRIL 5, 1943

  Davao Penal Colony

  Bert Bank had experienced many a restless night since the start of the war, but nothing quite like this. For Bank and more than 500 others, the ordeal had begun around 1800, during evening tenko. As per usual at day’s end, the POWs were lined up and counted. But this time, they were recounted. Then counted again. No matter which way the Japanese figured it, ten American POWs and two Filipinos were unaccounted for. Word quickly spread down the lines of assembled prisoners and was transmitted across the colony: the unthinkable, the impossible—an escape—had happened.

  It was a testament to the degree of secrecy with which the escapees had both planned and executed their breakout that almost nobody at

  Dapecol—American, Filipino, or Japanese—could believe it. At the Filipino hospital, a stunned Fely Campo remembered an innocuous conversation that she had had a few days earlier with another nurse named Maximina Orejodos. “Some things are going to happen,” Orejodos had said, cryptically. Campo knew that Orejodos and Ben de la Cruz had become romantically involved, but she never for a moment considered that he would be participating in an escape attempt with American prisoners.

  “The Japanese were beside themselves,” remembered Carl Nordin, who, like the rest of the POWs at Dapecol, was at the same time proud, bewildered, and fearful. “They kept counting and counting and counting. Of course, they couldn’t figure out how it could have happened…. I don’t think they realized that they had let themselves in for it, that they had gotten too lax.”

  But the Japanese promptly and characteristically assigned responsibility for the escape to the remaining prisoners. Manny Lawton, a friend of Bank’s, recalled standing at attention at sunset as the detested interpreter known as Running Wada delivered a rambling oration on behalf of Major Maeda: “For every man who escape, de other nine in his squad wirr be shoot kirred. You are arr guilty of herping them escape. De major say you wirr arr be confined to camp untir he decide what what other punishment wirr be necessary.”

  This revelatory pronouncement signaled either an alarmingly abrupt reversal of Japanese policy or a major miscalculation on the part of the escapees in judging Maeda’s character. While some POWs maintained that the Japanese never brought up the subject of shooting squads—not upon the prisoners’ arrival in November 1942, nor in the chaotic period immediately following the escape—others believed that the “ten for one” rule enacted at Cabanatuan was in use at Dapecol. A consensus was never reached and will likely forever remain a point of contention. “I never knew that there was a change in that order,” said Jack Donohoe, but, because it was so difficult to predict Japanese behavior, also said, “I didn’t know if 100 people would be killed or not.”

  Nobody knew. Bank believed that the Japanese intended to spill the prisoners’ blood in retribution for their wayward comrades’ indiscretion. It certainly seemed that way. The Japanese first marched the new American camp commander, Col. Kenneth Olson, as well as the leaders of the barracks where the fugitives had lived, to Maeda’s headquarters for questioning. The sounds of the beatings leaked out to the compound. “The Japanese worked some of them over pretty good,” remembered Donohoe. The Japanese then secured the names of those who slept next to the escapees. These men, the Americans were reportedly told, were to be executed, a summary guilt-by-association judgment. “Sleeping between [Dyess and Grashio] did not make me too popular with the Japanese,” said Bank.

  There was plenty of blame to go around. The Japanese knew that the POWs had had help. Pop Abrina returned from Davao City that evening to find the camp in an uproar and a squad of soldiers, led by Hozumi and Lieutenant Tsubota, waiting at his home. Feigning surprise, Abrina denied that he had anything to do with the escape. He truthfully told Hozumi that he had last seen the Americans the previous afternoon. He had been in Davao City and the driver of the Japanese truck could vouch for him. Unable immediately to implicate Abrina, Hozumi stormed out, leaving a promise. “[The Japanese] threatened me and my family to be shot to death should [they] find later on that I was responsible for the escape,” Abrina would write.

  While the fuming Japanese plotted to recapture the runaways, the POWs huddled together, discussing everything from the meaning of the escape to the significance of its timing. There were, of course, the unavoidable rumors: MacArthur had landed in Mindanao; Davao Province was in revolt; guerillas were preparing to attack Dapecol and liberate the prisoners. Naturally, the prisoners debated the import of the escape as it pertained to them. Some, such as Army Lt. Col. John H. McGee, who had been organizing an escape party of his own, grudgingly admired the escapees’ enterprise and courage. Yet others bitterly resented what they believed to be a selfish act because of the consequences it would bring down upon those left behind. Proof that the escape polarized the prisoners is found in a conversation overheard by Lawton that evening.

  “Those dirty bastards,” said one incensed POW, “don’t they know they might get a bunch of us killed?”

  “Wait a minute,” someone replied, “the book says that it is the duty of a prisoner of war to escape if he can.”

  Came back another: “That’s true. But the guy who wrote the book didn’t consider that we might be captured by barbarians who refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention rules.”

  “Yeah, and another thing. He assumed the prisoners would be within a reachable distance of our lines. Those guys know damn well they can’t swim to Australia.”

  Bert Bank had no idea how Dyess, Grashio, Shofner, and the others planned on reaching Allied territory, but he prayed that his friends would make good on their escape. As for his own fate, he knew that his slim chances for survival would be nil if there should be another escape this evening, a real likelihood with so many men like himself staring at the prospect of execution. That’s why he was keeping a vigil over the others in his bay—just as they were over him.

  In the wee hours of the morning, he heard some rustling noises. Bank saw the blurry outline of a man rise from a nearby bunk and begin fastening his canteen belt around his waist. Bank startled the man when he asked him if he planned to escape because, if so, Bank was going, too. No, the POW stammered, he was just trying on his canteen belt. Bank, not buying the story, groped for his own gear. “Well, I put my belt on also, explaining that I was just trying on my belt,” said Bank, “and we remained up all night watching each other.”

  At dawn, the entire camp stood at attention before Major Maeda. For several minutes, the portly commandant blasted the POWs with incomprehensible Japanese, and, no doubt, alcohol-tinged breath. The English distillate, courtesy of the interpreters, was 100 proof: “Eleven American dogs have escaped from us. YOU must pay.”

  The words were followed by the sound of the boots of several squads of fully equipped soldiers, led by Lieutenant Hozumi, marching through the camp’s gates. For those who had been at Cabanatuan, the movement must have seemed hauntingly familiar.

  MONDAY, APRIL 5, 1943

  Davao Province

  Nearly two dozen trees splashed across the newly rain-swollen river, the escapees’ own Rubicon, a boundary that demarcated the jungle from the swamp. Twelve pairs of feet then traversed the wet trunks, a bridge spanning their past and, they hoped, thei
r future. Heaving the logs into the water so that the makeshift bridge could not be used by their pursuers, they pressed forward. There was no turning back.

  The escapees entered what they believed to be the swamp at approximately 1000 and quickly began to understand why the tropical quagmire had such a fearsome reputation. Each step required concentrated effort—pulling one’s foot out of the slimy, green-brown ooze was like walking in tar. They encountered thickets of cogon, the ubiquitous sword grass that, theorized Grashio, “must have been created by Satan personally.” The cogon reached immense heights of seven to twelve feet, and each four-inch-wide, half-inch-thick blade was “covered with sharp spines that ripped clothing and flesh impartially.”

  Jumarong and de la Cruz, slashing a path at the vanguard of the procession, were soon bleeding profusely despite the burlap wrapped around their forearms. Shofner, Dobervich, and Boelens, the strongest members of the group, shouldered the cutters’ packs so that they could hack unencumbered. Yet no matter how violently the Filipinos swung their bolos, the cogon seemed to grow taller and thicker, an intimidating illusion created by the rising water level. The stagnant swamp water crept higher each passing hour, “an especially sinister progression for me,” recalled Grashio, “as I was the shortest of the whole group.”

  An occasional grassy hillock provided a brief opportunity for rest, but these swamp oases were few and far between. It certainly seemed that the swamp was indeed an evil entity actively conspiring against them, taunting, tripping, and entangling them with submerged logs, twisted tree roots, and thorn-studded vines. “The buhuka vine, which had quenched our thirst the day before, now seemed to regret its helpfulness and became a painful hindrance,” said Dyess.

  They staggered in silence. The only sounds were those of heavy, labored breathing, the burbling suction of their footsteps, and that of steel bolos slashing sword grass. The intense heat and high humidity were physically and emotionally enervating. While they looked at the map and thought in terms of kilometers, their progress, in reality, was measured in yards. Even with de la Cruz and Jumarong cutting at full capacity, they were averaging only 300 to 400 yards an hour. And Hawkins was growing increasingly worried that the tremendous output of energy was for naught. He had to speak up.